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The word that will get your blog banned in certain school districts, displayed as an image so that the filters won't be able to read it.

Blogger Miguel Guhlin is angry - angry with arbitrary censorship by school districts against his fellow educators. As Miguel reports on his blog, educational bloggers are finding their blogs blocked by school districts because they are talking about important, yet controversial educational issues. He cites the recent post by award-winning educational blogger Wesley Fryer, who laments that his blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, is being blocked in certain Texas school districts because he has written about the current debate around the youth social networking portal MySp@ce. (I've changed the letter "a" to an "@" so this blog entry can be read by teachers at these Texas school districts - otherwise my blog will be blocked as well.) The very act of using The M-Word on his blog has gotten him filtered.

Wes writes:

Are we living in the United States here, or totalitarian China? This is something we should be really concerned about as educators and citizens. I have titled this blog post "censored for relevance" because that is what I think is taking place here. Should educators be talking about social networking sites like MySp@ce? Of course. They should be reading blogs about MySp@ce, blogging themselves about MySp@ce, and even visiting MySp@ce. I think educators (even principals) should even create and maintain their own MySp@ce websites. I have started. [Me too, Wes.] Why?

Simply put, because as educators we should strive to remain relevant to students and engaged in their development of literacy skills. Social networking websites are going to continue to grow FAST in the months and years to come. We need to help students make better decisions about the information they share about themselves online, in MySpace and elswhere. In some cases, it is hard to speak intelligently about something if you have little personal experience about it yourself. I am not talking about illegal drug use here-- I am talking about blogging and use of social networking sites. And blogging is not a short term trend. This is a world-changing phenomenon.

As Miguel notes on his blog, important educational blogs like Wesley's site and the techLEARNING blog are getting censored arbitrarily because they are trying to raise awareness about sites like MySp@ce, encouraging critical examinations by educators and a greater emphasis on media literacy. To engage in a constructive debate about sites like this, you have to mention them. And preferably link to them. And these acts are getting bloggers banned by schools.

While I strongly am against any form of censorship, I am thoroughly disgusted by school districts that allow their filters to prevent educators from engaging in professional discourse. I have lost track of the number of times that I've posted a message to my WWWEDU discussion list and received a bunch of autoreplies from school districts saying that teachers there won't be reading my post because they contain "inappropriate content." Usually, these posts have to do with cases of school filtering censorship, controversial sites like MySp@ce or other media literacy-related challenges faced by the modern educator. The filtering software used to supposedly protect children is preventing educators from taking an active role in understanding and discussing the complexities of Internet use in the classroom. Schools may claim "in loco parentis" when describing filters used to protect children. But what are they trying to protect teachers from? Being better users of technology? Being responsible, informed educators?

Miguel, meanwhile, has issued a call to arms against these practices. He's asking educational bloggers to deliberately put the word MySp@ce.com in their blog (with the correct spelling) so that more blogs will be blocked arbitrarily, thus raising the stakes against the school districts that have adopted these foolish filtering practices. Miguel writes:

I encourage you to ask EVERY one you know to put the word "MySp@ce.com" on EVERY web site of importance, from educational sites to mapping sites to critical resources teachers and administrators use. I hope that by doing so, the outcry against banning words--not just URLs--will be so great as to cause education leaders to reconsider their decision to censor words, not URLs. It is important that you take up the call and spread it as widely as possible. I am asking for your help. With this post, my blog will be banned from some Texas school districts. When I'm done editing my own web pages, none of the resources I have spent years collecting will be available to the thousands of educators who have used them in the past.

I urge you to advocate this in every blog posting and web page you create. Add the word "MySp@ce" and/or "MySp@ce.com" to it. Get yourselves "censored" for it is better to be censored than to support authoritarian approaches to education in schools today.

You are powerful beyond measure. Subversion is no longer sufficient, if it ever was...we must tell the truth. We are Americans, and we must stand up against this, not angrily but in such a way that those who seek to censor come to understand the error of their ways.

I'm very happy to see Miguel, Wes and others standing up against inane filtering practices. I also support a campaign by educational bloggers to raise awareness for educators unfamiliar with this controversy. The question I have, though, is how do you spread a campaign when the very act of describing the campaign gets you censored? For example, any of the affected teachers trying to access Miguel's blog would be blocked. Undoubtedly, there are many other schools in the US using similar filtering parameters; educators there would also be unable to learn about the campaign, let alone participate. So that's why I've decided to spell the word in question with an "@" in it so there's a greater chance educators working behind the virtual iron curtain of filtering software will at least be aware of what's going on. That is, assuming they can access my site at all, since I've used the M-word on previous posts.

The whole thing reminds me of Those We Don't Speak Of, the mysterious creatures in M. Night Shyamalan's film, The Village. The parents of the village were so paranoid about their children coming to harm's way that they wouldn't even say the name of the creatures that were supposedly lurking in the local forest. We seem to have reached that point in education - where politicians and administrators are so paranoid that educators can't even speak the names of things that may lurk in the virtual forest, lest their students be corrupted by mere mention of them.

Miguel concludes:

It is not enough for us to sugarcoat or protect children, we must confront inappropriateness wherever we find it, serving as an example of what it means to be "appropriate" in the world.... This is our civic space, my space, your space, our space. We must, as Margot Stern Strom, president and executive director of Facing History and Ourselves, find ways to "engage adolescents in meaningful ways of how we learn to live together."

The Internet is indeed our civic space - my space, your space. Our space. How can educators educate our children to use the Internet as responsible 21st century citizens when we can't even speak about the things that might affect them? -andy

Ever since I woke up this morning, CNN has been recounting the grisly details behind the murder of 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin of Purcell, Oklahoma. Her body was found in the apartment of 26-year-old Kevin Underwood, who resided in her apartment complex. When police came by his apartment, he quickly confessed. "At that time Mr. Underwood stated 'go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up,"' stated a police affidavit.

Watching the news, I immediately began to wonder if Underwood had a blog. Just last summer, murder suspect Joseph Duncan made headlines because he maintained a blog. After a minute or so of Googling, I soon found Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K, a blog believed to have been published by Underwood since 2002.

At first blush, it is a typical personal blog, with links to other blogs ranging from John Aravosis' AMERICABlog to McSweeneys, as well as summaries of news stories from around the world. Digging a bit deeper, things get a lot darker. On the blog's profile page, Kevin describes himself as "Single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy." He then offers a chilling quote:

If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?
The skin of last night's main course.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend Easter morning reading the blog of an alleged murderer, but it was hard not to get sucked into this terribly sad story. The blog paints portrait of a very lonely person. In one lengthy post from last September, he recounts his struggle with depression and social phobia, in the context of his secret love for a woman he worked with. She and her boyfriend were in a horrible car accident; he died, while she was hospitalized.

I went to Tim's funeral, and I also went to see Genie in the hospital every day. She did make it through, but she was in the hospital until December 18, the day before my birthday. I went and saw her every day, and I would sit there for hours. Even the days she was unconscious, or so doped up on morphine she barely even knew who she was. Even when she was conscious, she'd still be so doped up I had to help her eat. Most days I was the only visitor she had, her family hardly ever even came to see her. Partly because it was about an hour's drive to even get to the hospital she was at. But I drove it every day, and sat with her every day.

I felt like a horrible person. Because in the back of my mind, a voice kept telling me, "Hey, she's single now, just give her a couple of months to get over the loss of Tim, and then make your move." I'd tell that voice to shut up, and stop thinking things like that, but it kept coming back.

In the end, the woman recovered and began dating another coworker, throwing Kevin into further bouts of depression.

[O]ver the last year or so I find myself becoming more and more detached from the world. I almost never leave the apartment except to go to work or my parents' house, and when I do leave the apartment, I walk around like a zombie, with a blank expression on my face, not looking at anything or anyone. In fact, the last couple of months, I've noticed that my eyesight is going, probably because my eyes are getting weak. Whenever I'm out of the house, I never focus on anything, I stare blankly ahead, operating on a sort of fuzzy peripheral vision. The only things I ever really focus on and look at are books or computer screens for hours on end, which strains my eyes further. When I'm not safe in my apartment, I am silent and expressionless, looking at nothing. I have no personality. If someone says hi to me, I either ignore them, or grunt out a small "hi," or "ok," if they ask me how I'm doing. It gets worse every day, I withdraw farther and farther into myself with each passing week.

My spirit has been totally crushed. Anyone who looks into my eyes can see this.

I wish I could be like I used to be. I wish I could be like Melissa.

I wish I could be human.

It is probably only a matter of time before the media begins talking about Kevin Underwood as the Murderer-Blogger, rather than just a murderer. The fact that it's possible for anyone with Internet access to delve into an accused killer's mind will no doubt serve as fodder for the Nancy Graces and Larry Kings of the world. I'm concerned, though, that these portrayals will link his blogging habits and obsessive Internet use with his horrific crime, somehow suggesting that blogging too much can drive any young person to pyschopathic behavior. While it's true that previous killers such as Eric Harris and Jeff Weise have been active in online publishing, this doesn't mean that other killers weren't writing things down before the birth of Web 2.0. From Westley Allan Dodd to David Berkowitz to the Unabomber, killers have kept meticulous records of their thoughts, fantasies and actions, yet no one ever makes the claim that keeping a journal somehow increases the likelihood of being a psychopath.

Unfortunately, there's a media fascination with all things Internet related. If a sexual predator hurts a child, it's local news, but if they meet each other on MySpace, it's national news. Simply adding the Internet to the criminal equation sensationalizes it even further, sometimes steering the blame to the technology rather than the criminal.

I've got to wonder, though, if blogs have ever stopped anyone from committing a horrific crime. Go back and read Kevin Underwood's blog, and it's clear that there were times when he was reaching out for help. In the case of the blog entry I quoted above, only a couple people replied initially, offering sincere, but limited emotional support. I wonder if his social network had been stronger, both online and offline, if he could have gotten the support and treatment he needed - and maybe this terrible tragedy could have been avoided. -andy